


You Endear Me

by WInger



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Detective Comics (Comics)
Genre: Batfamily, Bonding, Canon Compliant, Family Dynamics, Gen, Humor, Siblings, TT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:20:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23224666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WInger/pseuds/WInger
Summary: On mission to eliminate drones(Detective Comics #968)from overtaking Gotham city, Dick Grayson becomes privy to an astonishing development in Jason and Damian’s brotherly relations.It’s sweet and heartwarming - “cute” is just the word, in fact. Dick just can’t quite believe that he wasn’t a bigger catalyst for this all to happen.---“Do you think that Damian is cute?”By this point, Dick’s sat on it long enough to know that he’s right regardless of how his two brothers react to that.Damian barks several choice insults over the comms, and suddenly Dick’s radar is alerting him about incoming missiles from Robin’s plane. Red Hood goes even further, literally – punching the button for the supersonic boost and blasting out of Gotham without another word.“I’m right!” he yells at the two of them, evading Damian’s point-blank attack and engaging his own missiles. “You both know I’m right!”---
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 230
Collections: Fan Fiction Addiction





	You Endear Me

**Author's Note:**

> What does "TT" sound like to you?

The stage is Gotham City, and the Robins are gunning down the drone army unleashed over Gotham city in the freshly-dusted, old model Batjets from Bruce’s hangar, and every twenty minutes or so Dick's engines would cough out for a pants-shitting minute and he would have to manually reboot the system in mid-air - meanwhile the drones are literally from the future. Now he’s in the middle of carefully executing a barrel-roll at a speed too slow for the comfort of both his body and the plane fuselage, wishing desperately that one of the others could resolve this issue sooner rather than later, because really, not to kid anyone, but there's _really_ not a lot Dick can do in this piece of relic. 

With all that being said, there's more than enough on his plate for him to focus on that he could sincerely, lovingly, unoffensively do without the distraction of Robin and Red Hood incessantly snarking back and forth on the comms. It sounded like those two were having one heck of a time with each other and their Batjets. And Hood – forever the tease, a specialist at pushing people’s buttons – was deliberately riling Robin up. All things considered, what with the severity of the situation, Dick suspects that Damian doesn’t even realize he’s being baited into being so much chattier than normal.

Jason makes a comment. Damian retorts with a huff. Jason makes a sound – like a muffled cough, but why would he bother muffling a cough? – and then snipes back with another comment.

 _“Boys, focus,”_ Bruce growls.

Dick rights his plane _finally_ , then fiddles on his controls to make a new comms channel with all four of them, and boots Bruce from the original one. He doesn’t even know where he’s going with this, only acting on a vague instinct that this is the right thing to do.

Jason sighs wistfully. Over these decade-old mics and sensors, especially with non-existent volume controls and subpar oxygen filtration systems, every exhale from his fellow pilots sounded like someone was crunching on a chocolate bar right next to Dick’s ear. He’s _so_ hungry right now. _“It’s a shame the newer models were a no-go.”_

_“Is that really going to stop you from stealing this one, Hood?”_

_“You know me so well, Demon.”_

Predictably, Damian clicks his tongue in annoyance. Dick could never figure out his feelings towards that particular nickname – it seemed to vary depending on his mood. Now, over the comms, Robin’s _tsk_ is as sharp as a finger snap, the meaning it conveyed altered from its usual snide, under-the-breath judgement to a conspicuous demand for attention.

Dick finds himself so attuned to and distracted by the sound – and with Jason on the other end of the line, Damian has been ticking away like the second hand on a clock – he’s chased by a fleet of drones way too close to an office building. His left wing smashes a row of windows diagonally across five floors. He hoped to hell that was Wayne property.

Damian does his not-so-little noise again. “ _Nightwing! That is the Kane Tower!”_

“Aw come on, they have the money.” Property damage of this scale is loose change compared to the bigger beef between Gotham’s oldest families.

 _“Don’t strain yourself with more than you can handle.”_ Damian sneers. And he tuts loudly, as though his disappointment hadn’t been made clear enough. _“I’ll take care of them.”_

Jason snorts. He hasn’t been even speaking as much as he’d been snorting through this entire conversation. Dick would know – the sound comes on over like a sneeze. And Jason’s been ‘sneezing’ after damn near every single sentence Damian’s made.

Through the glass, Dick observes as Damian shoots past him and climbs parallel to the skyscrapers. He’s flying the biggest one, no less. Earlier they’d drawn factory reject Batarangs to determine who would get the first pick among the jets; shortest wins, and that was Dick, but the problem was his brothers didn’t have his sense of honor and had instead simply elected to _throw_ their Batarangs at the planes they wanted. Jason’s spun off-course and impaled the second-largest on the side. Damian swapped the misshapen one out for the real thing and nailed the largest on the nose. Bruce had snorted before jumping into the third largest.

Regaled to the smallest, slowest, and oldest working Batplane from the entire hangar, Dick has mostly been chasing down the drones that strayed from the big flock. Now he watched in trepidation as Damian attempted to draw them up, up and above the Gotham skyline.

“Robin,” he warns, preparing to re-direct his plane to go after him. Seriously, could this thing be any _slower?_

_“Don’t nag me!”_

“These planes haven’t been touched in a decade, you have to take it easy!”

Damian ignores him with the loudest click of his tongue yet. Jason sneezes – and suddenly Dick gets it. He’s not sneezing. That’s a chuckle. He’s being _tickled_ by something. _“What’s he up to, Nightwing?”_

“Attempting to lure the drones to the upper atmosphere, I think.”

_“Won’t make it.”_

“That’s what I’ve been saying. Robin! Pull back!”

Dick is _still_ rerouting – painfully slow, and with heavy sighs – and Jason easily beats him to the punch, flying over swiftly and lighting up the drones that Damian had attracted. _His_ plane seemed to have the best maneuverability. Dick refused to entertain the thought that Jason might be a better pilot than him.

_“Kid. Turn around.”_

For a brief second, Dick thinks to himself _thank god Jason’s here to steer him around,_ before remembering that Jason’s not him, and he wouldn’t just resolve the issue with the diplomatic finesse that is so characteristic of Richard John Grayson the Nightwing. Instead, Jason Peter Todd the Red Hood accelerates and shoots through the drone fleet, coming hot against Damian’s, the two planes belly to belly and mere meters apart from each other.

“Red Hood!” Dick snaps. A collision looked seconds away, and from that height, the fiery debris would be a nuclear level disaster. He chased after the two idiots, though he couldn’t get too close to them either. Physical limitations and safety concerns both. “This is _not_ the way to approach the problem!”

 _“Robin,”_ comes Jason’s annoying voice over the comms. “ _Engine failure is eminent. Turn back before you spiral out of the sky like a damned idiot. Wing, get ready to take the fleet out on my count... Now!”_

 _“I don’t need your flying advice,”_ Damian retorts, clicking his tongue as he loops around the moon. Jason pulls off in the other direction and barrel-rows like a big show-off. Dick goes as fast as his plane could and lights up the fleet. Jason is sniggering long enough for Dick to think that he’s not doing it consciously. No comment from Damian – probably focused, as he should be, on righting his plane – but Dick’s put two and two together.

“Hood.”

_“Sup, Big Bird?”_

“Do you think that Damian is _cute_?”

By this point, Dick’s sat on it long enough to know that he’s right regardless of how his two brothers react to that.

Damian lets loose an array of swear words in multiple languages at machine-gun pace, and suddenly Dick’s radar is alerting him about incoming missiles from Robin’s plane. Red Hood goes even further, literally – punching the button for the supersonic boost and blasting out of Gotham without another word.

“I’m right!” he yells at the two of them, evading Damian’s point-blank attack and engaging his own missiles. “You both know I’m right!”

“ _Robin what on Earth are you doing?”_ The bone-tired voice of Tim Drake suddenly enters the chat. _“Hood, turn that bird around_ right now _. We’re all looking at you. You can’t seriously be stealing- Why would you even steal a plane that old?”_

 _“My hand slipped,”_ Jason mutters.

“He’s embarrassed!” Dick crows. “He thinks Damain is cute!”

“ _I’ve made clear in the past to NEVER call me that!”_ Damian howls, pivoting his jet around and flying straight for Dick’s.

“ _Bye.”_ There’s a sound of a line being cut. Jason pulled himself off the comms.

 _“How did he even do that?”_ Tim asks. _“Punch the radio out? Put a bullet through it?”_

“If you check our three-way audio logs, you’ll see what’s got them so triggered.” Dick explains quickly. Just in case the family never saw him alive ever again. Damian is flying like a kamikaze pilot, and he’s more then reckless enough to bring their planes to a fiery crash just to make his point. Dick is equally terrified, uh, _wound up_ , and he pushes his plane to max speed while lowering his altitude to fly in-between the buildings. The GPS on his system was ancient, and he was relying his own internal map of Gotham. Nobody else needed to know that his confidence level was only around 78% tops.

“ _Why did you make a private channel with the other two?”_ It’s Bruce asking this time.

“Didn’t want to- _ugh_ , damn it – distract you with our combined nonsense.”

He could picture Tim empathetically pinching his lips together as he said that.

_“… I don’t remember ever complaining about the noise level with any of you.”_

“Well – _shit_ – three Robins all at once might be a bit much.”

Proving his words, the audio feed explodes that exact moment as Jason Todd is forced back online. In uncharacteristic panic he exclaims _“I don’t have control over my plane, and the eject button isn’t working!”_

 _“I’m flying it,”_ Tim tells him. _“Relax. Seat-belt, please, if you aren’t already wearing it.”_

“ _You deactivated the eject button? Do you want me dead again that badly?!”_

 _“Calm down!”_ Tim cries, wounded by the accusation. _“You’re safe in my hands!”_

Damian clucks out a “ _Pathetic.”_ He’s hot above Dick’s head, still firing, and has chased him all the way to Bludhaven. Jason chokes himself off mid-expletive.

“It’s the sound that Damian always makes!” Dick rushes the words out of his mouth, breathing a lot easier now that they were over the open harbor.

_“Grayson, don’t you dare-“_

“And _I_ also think it’s adorable.”

Damian can’t help himself – he makes that very sound, realizes, gets angry, and then realizes at the same time as Dick that Tim had just taken over both their planes as well. _“Nightwing, you- You DARE, RED ROBIN?”_

_“Batman’s controlling your plane, you’ll be fine.”_

_“Batman, you can personally lock all of them up in their rooms tonight and they’ll still be waking up the next morning with my swords through their throats!”_

_“Robin…”_

_“I mean it!”_

_“Please.”_

There’s an undeniable tension in the air when all three of them are brought to land in the Batcave one after the other. Dick jumps out of his cockpit as fast as he can, wanting to witness the confrontation. Jason is already heading out the exit. The force of a 13-year old ninja slams into Dick’s back and knocks him to the ground. Hissing and spitting, Damian throws double Batarangs at Jason’s retreating figure. One bounces off the back of his helmet, and Jason spins around with his guns up. Bruce is here - somewhere, among the shadows - and though Dick doesn't see him immediately he hears him when _he_ clicks his tongue, the sound sharp and bouncing off the walls in echoes. It's hovers in the air for a whole minute, reverberating through all of their heads. The timing of it too coincidental to be anything other than a natural expression of exasperation. And yet the poignancy of it, the weight and the meaning it carried - nobody, not a single soul, says a word, until-

“What’s that- Was _that_ the sound that you're all high on?” Tim pipes up carefully.

“What _it_ is, is that it reflects how much of a young, stupid little brat the little demon is-“

“You referring to the one I use to express how little I think of the rest of you? Why-“

“All liars,” Dick interjects, commanding the room with a deliberately loud, sonorous tone of voice. “Jason is blushing under his hood.”

Jason turns and _shoots_ him. Good thing Dick anticipated that and rolled in advance, taking Damian with him. Though his generosity proved traitorous when Damian stabs him. _Ow_ \- the feeling of a Batarang embedded in one’s guts is oddly nostalgic. Why are these two in particular so trigger-happy?

Damian squirms away as Dick gets to his feet, examining his wound. He processes the injury, which was shallow but prickly, but concludes that he just couldn’t get angry. Not at them. They’re family! And certainly not after this revelation. What a thing to lord over both Jason and Damian’s heads for _eternity_. “I think all of you are very cute,” he starts to say. “I do! This family-”

And he ducks quickly, but Jason’s guns had been sliced in clean half, and Damian had been summoned over to Bruce by grappling gun wire.

“That’s quite enough, Dick.” 

Dick clicks his tongue. Experimentally, he only wanted to try it out and see what it felt like. Tim responds with a click of his own in half a second. Damian's snarls are mushed by a large hand clamping down over his mouth. And Jason - why, he's on his way out again, trying to flee the unravelled truth for the third time in the same hour. 

"Quiet," Bruce sighs, with finality. "Just- quiet." 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by my fascination of Damian’s TT. I’ve personally never been able to stop reading it as “tee-tee”. I love Damian _so much_ he is so cute.


End file.
